Kinetic modeling of hydrogen production by the catalytic reforming of crude ethanol over a co-precipitated Ni-Al2O3 catalyst in a packed bed tubular reactor

In this work, we performed a kinetic modeling of the production of hydrogen by the catalytic reforming of crude ethanol over a 15%-Ni/Al2O3 catalyst prepared by the co-precipitation technique. The kinetics experiments were carried out at atmospheric pressure in a packed bed tubular reactor (8 min inside diameter, 150 mm heated length, 53.0 mm bed height), at temperature in the range of 593-793 K. Eley Rideal assumptions where the surface reaction involved an adsorbed species and a free gaseous species were used to develop the reaction mechanism and four models were proposed based on this mechanism, from which a new kinetic model based on the dissociation of adsorbed crude ethanol as the rate-determining step was developed for this novel catalytic process. This model was of the form: -r(A) = (2.08 x 10(3)e(-4430/RT)N(A))/[1 + 3.83 x 10(7) N-A](2). The absolute average deviation between experimental rates and those predicted using this model was 6%. (c) 2006 International Association for Hydrogen Energy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All fights reserved.